When looking for a CSR platform, companies are increasingly looking to Groundswell as an alternative to Benevity. This article will outline why Groundswell’s innovative approach, faster donation distribution timelines, lower fees, and mobile capability are winning over some of the most iconic companies in the Fortune 500.
A brief background on Benevity
Founded in 2008, Benevity is a legacy CSR platform that offers a suite of features that include employee giving, volunteering, micro-actions, global activities, and more.
Benevity has grown largely through acquisitions of smaller companies (e.g. Grantstream in 2015 and Alaya in 2020) and has reportedly had difficulty integrating these disparate platforms into a single, coherent technology stack. This is likely a leading contributor to a frequent customer complaint that the Benevity platform feels disjointed in the admin experience and that program data is challenging to extract. In fact, to extract data, an admin may have to log into as many as four separate reporting systems – two for Spark, and one each for Grants and the ERG module.
Groundswell - your top Benevity alternative
Groundswell was founded as an all-in-one platform for everything social impact. After raising $15 million in venture capital, led by Google Ventures (GV), Groundswell launched its platform in 2021. The Groundswell platform makes it easy and fun to run employee engagement programs like donation matching, volunteering, and employee assistance funds. Groundswell has been built utilizing the latest technology, making the administrative experience fast, frictionless, and scalable. This is just one of the many reasons why Groundswell is able to effortlessly serve customers from 50 to 50,000 employees.
More facts about Groundswell:
- Groundswell is the highest-rated CSR and corporate volunteering platform on G2. It's also rated the Easiest to Use, Most Implementable, Best Relationship, and Easiest to do Business With.
- Groundswell's mobile app is the highest-rated CSR app on iOS and Android
- Groundswell is the first corporate giving platform that provides employees with individual donor-advised funds (DAFs)– a massive leap forward in employee giving.
- Groundswell is founded by a team with deep experience in the nonprofit sector. CEO Jake Wood previously founded and led one of the nation’s leading disaster response organizations, Team Rubicon, from 2010 through 2021, and has received numerous awards for his work in the social impact sector.
How expensive is Benevity compared to Groundswell?
Groundswell and Benevity both charge annual licensing fees for access tot heir platforms. However, beyond the annual fee, their approaches begin to diverge. One key difference is with distribution fees:
- Benevity's distribution fees: 3.0%
- Groundswell's distribution fees: 1.0%
Additionally, Benevity will often assess ad hoc fees to customers for incremental services. Want to send an off-cycle donation to a charity? There’s a fee for that. Want to add volunteer rewards? There’s a fee for that. Want to get support from your client success manager during a campaign? There’s a fee for that.
Bottom line: there’s no cost-certainty with Benevity.
Alternatively, Groundswell’s fees are straightforward, transparent, and predictable. Want to add a nonprofit to our database? There’s no fee for that. Want to chat with our customer success team or head of impact? There’s no fee for that.
How effective is Benevity at distributing funds to charity?
Admittedly, Benevity is a recognized leader in its ability to support large multinational corporations seeking comprehensive tax-advantages across a global workforce. Companies can pay additional fees for separate corporate instances across multiple continents. These separate instances assist local employees with maximizing the tax deductibility of their gifts, however, it adds significantly to the annual cost and monthly administrative burden for companies.
Where Benevity fails its customers, its employee-users, and most importantly, the nonprofits it is sending funds to, is the length of time it takes for an employee’s matching donation to reach charity.
Let’s dive into this for greater clarity. First, it’s important to understand that Benevity aggregates all user donations made to a charity throughout thea month and sends those aggregated donations as a single payment. So, as an example, imagine one hundred employees across ten different companies donate to the Red Cross in January, and the aggregate total of these donations is $10,000. Here is what Benevity’s rough distribution timeline looks like:
- January: 100 employees across 10 companies donate $10,000 to the Red Cross
- Late February: Benevity sends the employees’ $10,000 to the Red Cross and sends an invoice to the 10 companies for their respective share of the match for their employees. Note that each company will have different invoice payment terms, typically no less than net-30 days, but often stretching to net-60 or worse.
- Late March or April: Benevity begins receiving the matching funds from the 10 companies, but is delayed in distributing them to the charity until all companies have remitted payment.
- Late April or May: Benevity initiates payment of the matching funds to the Red Cross, a full 3-4 months after the employee made the donation.
There are two major issues with this timeline. First, the employee would likely be very disappointed if they knew that their match was going to take four months to reach their nonprofit. The thrill of thinking their donation was having twice as much impact would be significantly diminished – especially if they’re donating in response to an emergent event like a natural disaster. Second, this timeline exacerbates cash flow issues that already hamper nonprofits in need of funds to execute their mission.
Groundswell has gone to great lengths to resolve this delayed distribution standard. With Groundswell, an employee’s donation contribution to their Groundswell account is matched instantly, and 90% of charities receive their funds within 24 hours. When they donate their funds to charity the distribution process never takes longer than the fifth business day following month-end close.
Does Benevity effectively reduce a company’s administrative burden?
If you're moving from a fully manual employee matching program, wherein requests are tracked on excel spreadsheets, employees are submitting PDF requests for their match, and a company’s accounts payable team is sending individual matching checks – Benevity may reduce some of your administrative burden.
However, with Benevity, companies can still anticipate multiple monthly invoices, payment auditing and reconciliations with payroll departments, and complex and recurring data management to support payroll giving deductions, among other things.
Groundswell customers see a marked reduction in their administrative burden. Companies deal with only a single annual invoice for their licensing fees. And our platform’s design has eliminated:
- Monthly invoices for employee matches
- Monthly data management for recurring payroll giving deductions
- Payment auditing and reconciliations
- Complex data exporting for management reports
Does Benevity provide employees with donor-advised funds?
No, Benevity does not offer employees an individual donor-advised fund. Benevity’s platform simply automates the donation matching process – it does not provide employees with a tax-advantaged vehicle to set aside funds for charitable giving.
Groundswell’s vision of democratizing philanthropy is in part rooted in its drive to make donor-advised funds a ubiquitous part of employee benefit packages. Just as 401(k)s and health savings accounts have financially empowered employees over the past several decades, Groundswell believes that donor-advised funds will be the key to empowering employees to become modern philanthropists.
Groundswell is proud to be the only enterprise corporate giving platform that provides employees with donor-advised funds. These accounts are critical to Groundswell’s key differentiating features, including:
- The ability to instantly match employee donations
- The ability for employees to take their giving account with them if they leave the company, just like a 401(k)
- The ability to centralize all of their personal giving into a single end of year tax receipt for deduction purposes
- The ability to donate stock instead of cash, thereby avoiding capital gains taxes on appreciation
How effective is Benevity at increasing employee engagement?
While Benevity offers giving and volunteering features, their lack of privacy features and poor UX/UI can impact a good employee experience.
For many people, their giving history is deeply personal and inspired by lived experiences. For that reason, some employees don’t participate in giving programs via Benevity because administrators have full visibility into their personal giving history. This can make them feel that the program isn’t inclusive and equitable.
Here are some reasons why employees might want privacy in their giving:
- As mentioned, their giving could be deeply personal – for example, a recovered alcoholic may support Alcoholics Anonymous, but not want someone in HR to know about their struggles with addiction.
- In today’s hyper-polarized world, employees within larger companies likely fall on both sides of emotionally charged issues. An employee may sense a risk of retaliation or alienation for submitting a donation related to a nonprofit they sense is not aligned to the particular values of the Benevity administrator at their company.
In addition to a lack of privacy features, Benevity has a very poor mobile experience. Having been available to download and use for several years, the Benevity app has only 19 reviews on Apple’s store, with an average 3-star rating.
Making matters worse, submitted reviews include comments such as:
- “Do any of the developers use this app themselves??”
- “Easy to use, but very unstable and crashes a lot.”
- “Downloaded to search for some non profits [sic] to donate to. The search feature is broken.”
Meanwhile, Groundswell's top-rated mobile app offers a feature-rich alternative to its employee web experience. Today’s workforce expects a rich native-mobile experience, and research indicates that most people today do the majority of their financial transactions via their mobile device. Our mobile app has over 300 reviews in the first year, with an average 4.95 star rating in the Apple store.
So, is Benevity a good fit for you?
In summary, Benevity is:
- Expensive and full of surprise fees
- Difficult and costly to implement
- Challenging to administer
- An automation tool, not a donor-advised fund
- Clunky to use and not mobile friendly
- Slow to distribute funds to charity
Groundswell, a better alternative
Our platform is simple and easy. We provide:
- Admin-free burden. Admin teams can manage their giving program in one platform and they don't have to collect any receipts.
- A mobile-friendly experience for employees. Whether they're on their phone in the field or sitting behind a desk, employees can save, donate, and track all their donations in one place. See the employee experience here.
- Tax-advantaged personal employee giving accounts. Groundswell provides accounts powered by Donor-Advised Funds (DAF).
